The Android software introduced last year now accounts for about 8 percent of all mobile Web browsing to rank second behind Apple Inc.’s iPhone, Google executives said Thursday. Without providing specifics, Schmidt said Android’s usage will expand later this year as part of “quite significant” announcements by Google involving several new pieces of hardware.

I wonder what is meant by this.Â Could Schmidt be talking about more than just phones?Â Or could he be hinting that he expects Motorola, LG, and others to make formal announcements.

There are announcements happening between now and the end of the year that are quite significant from operators and new hardware partners in the Android space, which I wonâ€™t preannounce except to say that they really do fulfill much of the vision that we laid out more than a year ago… On the netbook side, there are a number of people who have actually taken Android and ported it over to netbook or netbook-similar devices. So we think thatâ€™s another one of the great benefits of the open source model that weâ€™ve used. Weâ€™re excited that that investment is occurring. And again, largely outside of Google, which we think is great.